Malawi

Malawi experienced the most severe floods in living memory in 2015; 176 people were killed and over 200,000 were displaced. MSF responded with a five-month emergency operation in the south of the country.

MSF mobile clinics provided 40,000 outpatient consultations and distributed relief items such as water treatment kits and mosquito nets to over 13,000 households. Teams also delivered three million liters of drinking water, which helped to contain a cholera epidemic that had flared up in neighbouring Mozambique and spread to Malawi: 279 cases of the disease were recorded in MSF-supported facilities in Nsanje and Chikhwawa.

HIV care

Despite significant progress in prevention in recent years, an estimated one million people are still living with HIV in Malawi and only half of them receive treatment. The health authorities have launched an ambitious plan to accelerate the fight against the disease by increasing the resources allocated to it and focusing on assisting the most vulnerable and hard-to-reach people, such as sex workers.

The four-year handover process that started in Chiradzulu in August 2014 continued, and is due to complete by mid-2018. In this district, MSF supported more than 33,000 HIV patients, of which 18,800 are enrolled in the so-called ‘six month appointment’ schedule, whereby stable patients attend a consultation only twice a year. This not only benefits patients, but also reduces staff workload, allowing them to focus on more complex cases. MSF has implemented point-of-care viral load testing in seven of the health centres, facilitating access to rapid confirmation of suspected treatment failures. MSF is advocating for this type of decentralised testing in areas with high prevalence like Chiradzulu district.